In response to concerns about teacher retention, especially among teachers in their first to fourth year in the classroom, we offer future teachers a series of brief guides full of practical advice that they can refer to in both their student teaching and in their first years on the job.

Emphasizing an appreciation for street lit as a way to promote reading and library use, Morris’s book helps library staff establish their “street cred” by giving them the information they need to provide knowledgeable guidance.

Comprehensive and comparative, this volume investigates African American street novelists since the Chicago Black Renaissance and the semiotic strategies they employ in publication, consumption, and depiction of street life. Divided into three chapters, this text analyzes the content, style, and ethics of “street” narrative through a discursive/rhetorical lens, exploring the development of street literature’s formal and contextual concerns to resolve the sociocultural and political questions surrounding cultural work. The book also gives emphasis to “text” or (post)structural literary analysis by answering questions about the genre’s aesthetic and linguistic techniques that respond to the injustices of urban planning. The last chapter, “Representation,” investigates the phenomenological hermeneutics of more recent street literature and its satire, highlighting the political stakes for authorship, credibility, and subjectivity. Through historical and contemporary studies of urban space, Blackness, and adaptations of street literature, this work attempts to network activists, artists, and scholars with the greater reading public by providing a functional ontology of reading the inner city.

Given the current educational climate of high stakes testing, standardized curriculum, and 'approved' reading lists, incorporating unauthorized, popular literature into the classroom becomes a political choice. The authors examine why teachers choose to read Harry Potter , how they use the books, and the resulting teacher-student interactions.

Offering more than 400 street-lit titles, this guide helps readers' advisors and other librarians to better understand the genre and collect and recommend titles ranging from romance and coming-of-age stories to action stories and erotica. Street lit is also known to its enthusiastic readers as "urban fiction," "ghetto lit," "hip-hop lit," and "gangsta lit." No matter what it's called, it remains one of the most significant and increasingly popular forms of modern literature. This text provides a much-needed resource guide to this vibrant genre. In this title, more than 400 entries appear in eleven chapters, each focusing on a different subgenre of street lit. The author has organized titles by popular subgenres and themes, such as prison life and urban erotica, to help librarians more easily identify read-alikes. Urban Grit: A Guide to Street Lit also contains practical tips on integrating these books into an existing collection or library program and meeting challenges that may arise in the process.

Over the last few decades, the genre of urban fiction—or street lit—has become increasingly popular as more novels secure a place on bestseller lists that were once the domain of mainstream authors. In the 1970s, pioneers such as Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and Claude Brown paved the way for today’s street fiction novelists, poets, and short story writers, including Sister Souljah, Kenji Jasper, and Colson Whitehead. In Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, Keenan Norris has assembled a varied collection of articles, essays, interviews, and poems that capture the spirit of urban fiction and nonfiction produced from the 1950s through the present day. Providing both critical analyses and personal insights, these works explore the street lit phenomenon to help readers understand how and why this once underground genre has become such a vital force in contemporary literature. Interviews with literary icons David Bradley, Gerald Early, and Lynel Gardner are balanced with critical discussions of works by Goines, Jasper, Whitehead, and others. With an introduction by Norris that explores the roots of street lit, this collection defines the genre for today’s readers and provides valuable insights into a cultural force that is fast becoming as important to the American literary scene as hip-hop is to music. Featuring a foreword by bestselling novelist Omar Tyree (Flyy Girl) and comprised of works by scholars, established authors, and new voices, Street Lit will inspire any reader who wants to understand the significance of this sometimes controversial but unquestionably popular art form.

A seven-step plan for really engaging our urban students Every day, thousands of students sit in our city classrooms, emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally disengaged. Teachers have their success stories; still, the ability to create and sustain an engaging practice remains elusive. This important book offers new hope. Drawing on his more than twenty years of experience working with high-poverty, urban, minority students, Jelani Jabari delivers Seven cohesive steps for planning, delivering, and reflecting on captivating learning experiences Techniques for gathering critical information about your students to forge deeper connections Strategies to transform students' perceived "deficits" into instructional assets An emphasis on teaching methods and classroom culture, not simply standards and accountability The INSPIRE process will take you beyond discrete, isolated techniques to develop a comprehensive approach to building students' personal and academic success. You'll quickly discover that there's no better guide to implementing real and lasting change in our toughest classrooms.